This disclosure relates generally to electronic payment systems for payment card transactions, and more specifically to electronic payment card systems and methods with transaction-based and location-based merchant incentive notification capability and dynamic geo-targeted delivery management of goods provided by different merchants to cardholders in the same geographic area.
Electronic payment card processing systems are in widespread use to process transactions between a payment card holder, a merchant, an acquirer bank, and an issuing bank. The transaction may involve the physical payment card itself at a point-of-sale terminal, a device associated with a payment card (or an account of a payment card) that includes payment card information and digital payment capability (e.g., a smart phone device including a digital wallet), or manually entered payment card information via another device such as a computer device interfacing with a merchant online. Sophisticated multi-party payment card processing systems are known to process payment card transactions, confirm authorized charges, manage payments and transfer of funds, confirm payment status, and compute available credit balances.
When a cardholder uses a payment card (e.g., a credit card or a debit card) to initiate a transaction to purchase goods or services from a merchant, an acquiring bank (i.e., the merchant's bank) will typically reimburse the merchant for the transaction. The acquiring bank will then settle those funds with an issuing bank of the account corresponding to the payment card by presenting transaction data, associated with the transaction, to a payment processor. In a process known as clearing, transaction data is communicated from the acquiring bank through the payment processor to the issuing bank. After clearing, settlement of the final payment occurs via the payment processor. Settlement is a process used to exchange funds between the acquiring bank and the issuing bank for the net value of a batch of all monetary transactions that have cleared for that processing day.
Merchants sometimes provide home delivery services for purchased goods to their customers in the same general area, as well as delivery services to another location such as a business provided that it is also within the same general area. Often, such merchants offer home delivery services only within a limited area defined by a radius of miles from the actual merchant location. Also, and sometimes in addition to limited delivery area requirements, merchants sometimes limit delivery services to orders that meet minimum order requirements, typically in terms of dollar value. Orders outside the limited delivery area and/or orders that do not meet the minimum order requirements are generally not considered eligible for delivery, and this imposes undesirable limitations on merchant/customer relationships. Customers that may otherwise desire transactions with such merchants may not make them, or may cancel them, because of they do not meet the delivery requirements, and merchants must turn down some customer orders for failure to meet the delivery requirements.
Much transaction data is captured by such multi-party payment card processing systems that is presently under-utilized to address issues presented by merchant delivery eligibility requirements. Merchants and cardholders alike may benefit from information that can be gleaned from a multi-party payment card processing system that can promote and incentivize cardholder transactions with merchants with coordinated delivery management to reduce costs and improve the customer/merchant relationship. Improvements are accordingly desired.